Joyful Noise Recordings has announced Shimmy Disc label founder Kramer as its 2020 artist-in-residence. The post-punk musician and producer (Galaxie 500, Low, Daniel Johnston) established the New York based label in 1987. As part of the residency, the label will relaunch with five releases from various new projects to be made available as downloads in addition to a limited edition five LP box set in early 2021.

The first release to be announced is Songs We Sang In Our Dreams, the debut album from his project with vocalist Xan Tyler called Let It Come Down: a project that's been “percolating in Kramer's mind for over 20 years”.

“I’d been hearing Xan's voice in my dreams for decades, so you can imagine the shock I experienced when I first heard her voice while awake,” said Kramer. “I invited her to work with me on an LP of songs I'd been working on for a long, long time.”

Listen to “Monday” below. You can pre-order the box set or buy a series of downloads, delivered monthly to your inbox for the rest of the year.

The second volume in Shelter Press's yearly anthology Spectres has been published. Produced in collaboration with GRM in France, the new edition explores the theme of Resonances/Résonances: “To sound again – with the immediate implication of a doubling”.

Published in French and English, artists involved are The Caretaker, Tomoko Sauvage, David Toop, Chris Corsano, Ellen Fullman, Christina Kubisch, Okkyung Lee, Pali Meursault, Jean-Luc Nancy, David Rosenboom and Christian Zanési. The volume also includes a previously unpublished text by Maryanne Amacher on tones.

Edited by François J Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson, Spectres II: Resonances is available now in an edition of 2500.

Roger & Brian Eno (interviewed in The Wire 434) have invited fans to contribute to their film project A Quiet Scene. "We want to ask you to submit a single shot film of a quiet scene; at home, or out the window, or in your garden. Clouds passing, rustling tree leaves, a bird nesting, people conducting activities in the house: quiet moments that we are all enjoying, together, in isolation", the pair explain.

Footage is meant as a backdrop to the music from their recent album Mixing Colours, released earlier this year by Deutsche Grammophon, and can be slow motion and running from three to five minutes. 11 videos will be selected as official accompaniment for music from the album.

Deadline is 29 May. You can view previous submissions and find full instructions on their website.

Milan’s Terraforma has announced it’s postponing this year’s festival until 2–4 July 2021. Still at the same location, Villa Arconati-FAR, the longtime eco-friendly event has taken the opportunity to launch a new home initiative: a biennial reforestation project. The project follows on from the restoration of Villa Arconati’s Labyrinth, and will see the land that hosts the festival’s campsite planted with around 100 trees, lime, ash and oak among them.

Launched in collaboration with Fondazione Augusto Rancilio and supported by Borotalco and Fondazione Comunitaria Nord Milano, the project was conceived by the Space Caviar research and design studio. It was inspired by the architect Cesare Leonardi’s The Architecture Of Trees, which examines the configurations of the trees according to their shadows, and Joseph Beuys's 7000 Oaks project in Kassel, Germany (1982). Its fundamental aim is to have a positive impact on the festival grounds by helping to neutralise CO2 emissions.

Ticket holders for the 2020 edition can expect an email soon with details about transferring passes.

Alan Licht has announced the Bandcamp release of a selection of previously unheard collaborations. “In the past several weeks I’ve been going through my archives and listening to old live recordings that have never been released,” he says. “I came up with a few gems, contacted my collaborators and am making them available now as exclusive downloads”.

Uploaded to Bandcamp – just in time for tomorrow's fee waiver effort – are recordings of Nels Cline, Licht & William Hooker at Issue Project Room in 2011 (“Essentially a Text Of Light gig, with Nels subbing for Lee”); a previously lost daytime session between Licht & Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe in 2007; Licht & Aki Onda live at Cornell University 2007, self-described as “an unbroken 50+ minute improv, very different from our Everydays album”; and a recording of Licht & Tetuzi Akiyama's first meeting, performing live at subTonic 2003.

Licht promises to add more in the coming weeks, and he's also contemplating the posting of some out of print works.

In its continued support of artists during the Covid-19 crisis, Bandcamp will be waiving its revenue share on all purchases on the first Friday of every month, midnight–midnight PDT, until 3 July.

Various aspects of the Somerset House Studios programme have gone online.

Starting 28 April and continuing monthly 6–7pm until October, a series of new commissions from Studio artists responding to the provocation “I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now” will be streamed live via the SHS website. The series takes its title from a recent Gallery 31 exhibition named after an existing work by studio artist Vivienne Griffin, who will launch the programme with a broadcast exploring themes of care, connection and commonality. Following that, Juliana Huxtable will perform for the May edition.

Also programmed are fortnightly digital sessions for young people aged 18–30 looking to work in the creative industries. Upgrade Yourself: Peer Exchange starts on 30 April midday–2pm with Maeve Brennan, followed by sessions with Evi Kalogiropoulou, Nabihah Iqbal and Akil Benjamin. In addition, a series of online workshops with Joanne Armitage, Dan Evans, Johann Diedrick and Jessica Ekomane will take place.

An open call for applicants to a digital residency called Sonic Terrains – which offers £3,000 and mentoring – has also been announced.

Full details of what's on can be found on the Somerset House Studios website.

The New York based musician Charles Tolliver has announced his first studio album in 13 years. The self-taught trumpeter has been active since the 1960s – he made his recording debut with Jackie McLean on Blue Note in 1964. His last studio album, 2007’s With Love, was also released by Blue Note.

Now signed to Gearbox Records, Tolliver recorded his new album Connect at RAK Studios last November with a band including Jesse Davis on alto saxophone, Keith Brown on piano, Buster Williams on double bass and Lenny White on drums, as well as Gearbox saxophonist Binker Golding appearing on two of its tracks. It was engineered by Tony Platt.

“With both of our collective recording label expertise,” says Tolliver, “a recording of my touring band could and would be done. I chose to CONNECT consummate artists whose performances represent absolutely THE Real Deal in this artform.”

Charles Tolliver’s Connect will be released this summer.

Krakow, Poland’s Unsound festival will take a break from its traditional programming schedule this year, shifting its focus from live performance to livestreams and talks: “A festival where the sound of music largely gives way to the sound of speaking and listening.” As a nod to said break, Unsound has named its 2020 edition Intermission, describing the theme as an embodiment of “multiple, and somehow contradictory, forces”. It’s another stark reminder of the current instability the music industry is currently experiencing in the face of Covid-19 and uncertainty over the longevity of social distancing measures.

Involving artists, musicians, writers, theorists, activists and scientists, subjects open for debate include: music under lockdown; pandemic and post-pandemic soundscapes; technologies of emergency; the environment; and new forms of power. Featuring presentations, performative lectures, interviews and discussions, the programme will be streamed live and archived online.

Music performance may still be included, but how and where will depend on changing measures and guidelines as the situation unfolds.

Also announced: a book related Intermission, containing essays, interviews and visual works; a compilation of tracks made by friends of Unsound; and an open call for online performances and lectures around this year's subject. Submission of up to 4000 characters should be sent to intermission@unsound.pl by 18 May.

Unsound 2020 will take place from 4–11 October.

US jazz musician Henry Grimes died last week. Born in Philadelphia on 3 November 1935, Grimes took up double bass in high school. He studied at Juilliard and by the mid-1950s was an established jazz musician, playing with Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk and Lee Konitz, among others, and as second bassist alongside Charles Mingus.

In the mid-1960s Grimes performed on many key free jazz albums, including Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Don Cherry’s Complete Communion, Symphony For Improvisers and Where Is Brooklyn?, Pharoah Sanders’s Tauhid, Archie Shepp’s On This Night, and Albert Ayler’s Live At The Village Vanguard. The Henry Grimes Trio album The Call, featuring Perry Robinson and Tom Price, was released in 1965 by ESP Disk. Two years later, in 1967, he left New York and disappeared under the radar for more than 30 years. Many rumours of his whereabouts, and even his death, circulated until he was tracked down in Los Angeles in 2002 by social worker-cum-jazz fanatic Marshall Marrotte. He'd stopped playing, Grimes said, in order to “gain perspectives. It was a way of imposing self-isolation.” He instead spent time writing poetry – signs along the road was published by buddy's knife jazzedition in 2007 – and working in various non-music related jobs.

Soon after, he returned to the stage with the help of William Parker, who gave him a double bass. Grimes quickly made up for lost time. In 2003 he was awarded a returning hero's welcome at Vision Festival in New York. He subsequently toured extensively and recorded albums with David Murray, Hamid Drake, Marc Ribot, Rashied Ali, Marilyn Crispell, Paul Dunmall, Andrew Cyrille and others, as well as taking up a number of residencies and teaching posts offering workshops and master classes. In 2016 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Arts for Art/Vision Festival. He died from Covid-19 complications on 15 April.

Read Marshall Marrotte's interview first printed in the pages of The Wire 227 and available now for free via Exact Editions. After that, read Howard Mandel's report in The Wire 290, documenting Grimes's return.

Nicole Mitchell and Lisa E Harris have collaborated on a new album that draws inspiration from Octavia E Butler's 1993 novel Parable Of The Sower and its 1998 sequel Parable Of The Talents. Recorded in 2017 at the Art Institute of Chicago, flautist and composer Mitchell points out the novels' prescience. “If you read Parable Of The Sower right now, it's going to explain a lot of what's happening in our world today,” she says. “And this was written in 1993 by Octavia Butler. Her purpose was to be able to use science fiction as a way for us to look at some of the social issues that we're dealing with in our world.”

This album isn't Mitchell's first tribute to Butler: in 2017 she published the sci-fi novella and album Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds, before which came albums Xenogenesis Suite (2008) and Intergalactic Beings (2014). Indeed, when the pair met at the New Quorum Composers’ Residency in New Orleans, it was this shared interest for Butler's writings that paired Mitchell with the theremin player, composer and filmmaker Harris, who had discovered Butler’s novels whilst writing an opera called Lilith.

Both artists worked collaboratively on the text and the music: “We were very interested in how we, as a duo, could truly co-compose across both of these disciplines, and create a sacred space for the unknown to sound,” says Harris. “We really combined our vision. And the piece unfolded like a conversation, at every step.”

As well as Harris' spinto soprano, EarthSeed also features the tenor vocals of Julian Otis, and musicians of Black Earth Ensemble: Tomeka Reid, Zara Zaharieva, Ben LaMar Gay and Avreeayl Ra. “It’s all about community,” Mitchell confirms. “The voices of the musicians are also contributing, through their improvisation, towards the sonic expression of the piece.”

Mitchell adds: “What I really like about the album is that it has humour. In African-American culture, resilience is why we're still here. Because if you don't have a sense of humour, that means that you're not being elastic. It’s that bounce that helps us to be resilient, to overcome obstacles, and to move through difficult moments and know that there is going to be an end.”

EarthSeed is released on 26 June on FPE Records. Listen to “Evernascence/Evanescence” and “Yes And Know” below.